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Sales accounts are harder than ever to win, let alone keep. Globalization, cloud computing, and crowdsourcing create a marketplace where any account can be lured away by a hungry startup. And the face-time advantage? Forget it. Today's high-quality sale will likely involve six or more decision makers.

That's why it's time to get strategic about how sales teams frame their approach. In Essential Account Planning, sales enablement expert Mark Donnolo blends his years of experience with expert interviews and stories to show you how planning can reliably drive revenue. His five-point framework will prepare you to address the arguments you're certain to hear against account planning, such as lack of commitment, ownership, and time.

Each sales organization is unique, but most have similar challenges and succeed using common principles. And chances are, sales reps in your company already perform many of these account planning tasks, albeit on the fly or independent of others. This book's ready-to-use tools and templates will help you get everyone on the same page to deliver immediate results.

In this book, you'll learn how to:

Develop a consistent account plan structure.

Create the habits and culture of an ongoing planning process.

Navigate the politics that impede information sharing.

Many salespeople believe that more selling creates more sales, but the salespeople who invest in account planning become the true sales leaders. Use Essential Account Planning to bring stability to your sales organization and start seeing the rewards of planning today!

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark Donnolo is managing partner of SalesGlobe and author of The Innovative Sale: Unleash Your Creativity for Better Customer Solutions and Extraordinary Results and What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation. He focuses on helping companies grow profitably by developing and implementing strategies that improve the effectiveness of their customer-facing sales, marketing, and service organizations. His areas of focus include sales strategy, customer segmentation, channel strategy, sales organization design and deployment, performance management, and incentive compensation. Mark's work spans several industries, including technology, telecommunications, business services, manufacturing, and financial services.

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The author has done a great job in bringing new and fresh perspective to a subject that, on the face of it, has been addressed by many other books with a similar title. The reality is that many companies (perhaps most) are poor in account planning and one has to ask why given it's not a new idea. Indeed, few would argue against it being an appropriate discipline for any B2B that employs account managers. This book addresses such challenges and some of my favourite sections are:

- how to deal with organisational politics affecting account planning- the different account plans for different types of account e.g pursuit, tactical, aspirational, strategic- how selling solutions can be made easier (cross-functional stakeholders within your company can be brought together and aligned using the account planning process the author sets out)- the large number of account planning templates to utilise and tailor for your company's situation- creating habit in account planning versus 'launch and leave'

Content such as some of that which I've called out is key in today's environment where we see so many account/sales managers finding it difficult to focus on anything other than fire fighting. I work across Europe and NA in many sectors and talk to a) sellers saying things are more hectic than they've ever been and b) sales leaders/SVPs talking about how change initiatives typically fail at their company.....therefore, dealing with issues that affect adoption of new approaches, such as account planning, is of equal importance as the theory behind such new models. This book takes on some of the adoption issues.

So, this is a solid, easy-to-read title that is professionally written (and let's face it, for sales books, that isn't always the case - there are plenty of over-hyped books aimed at sellers that promise amazing results and don't really give the sales function a professional image). When I think back to some of the other titles on account planning/management, I can't fault this book. You're bound to take something from it, potentially a lot.

I saw the author speak at a recent conference and I read the book. Great content, practical, and addresses a lot of our issues on how to get the organization to work together and how to move account planning from an administrative exercise to a living process. Excellent!